Blaine Scandals: Mulligan Letters and
Marriage
Republican presidential nominee James Blaine had
been tarred with the taint of corruption since 1876. In 1869, Blaine used his
influence as speaker of the house to ensure passage of a land grant for the
Little Rock & Fort Smith Railroad. In gratitude, Warren Fisher, one of the
firm's contractors, allowed Blaine to sell securities in the railroad company
and, at the speaker's insistence, pocket a suspiciously large commission in
bonds. When the railroad had financial difficulties, resulting in the bonds
becoming nearly without value, one of the firm's wealthy backers, Tom Scott,
bought the almost worthless bonds back from Blaine and his friends at a price
well above their market value. In return, Speaker Blaine pushed legislation to
benefit Scott's Texas & Pacific Railroad.
The scandal first came to light when Blaine was
seeking the Republican nomination in 1876. Blaine attempted to exonerate himself
on the floor of the House, but copies of letters to Fisher were revealed by a
disgruntled company clerk, James Mulligan. An official House investigation,
though, was dropped when Blaine was appointed to the Senate. Blaine's
questionable dealings, as well his attempt to cover up the scandal by lying to
his colleagues and the public, came back to haunt him when he sought the
Republican nomination in 1880 and the presidency in 1884. The full text of the
letters was published widely in newspapers during 1884. As a postscript to one
of the Mulligan letters (as they became known), Blaine had scribbled, "Burn this
letter!" Democratic followers chanted that phrase at political rallies during
the campaign.
Blaine also had to deal with his own sex scandal.
The rumor originally appeared on the back-page of The New York Times in
1876, but, with Blaine's loss of the nomination, failed to gain public
attention. In late August 1884, the Indianapolis Sentinel revived the allegation
that as a young man Blaine had impregnated a young woman, whom he married only
under threat of her father's shotgun. The Republican nominee swiftly denied the
charge, and sued the newspaper for libel. He was probably trying to force a
public retraction, but the tactic backfired. The newspaper could not prove their
case of a shotgun-marriage, but it did produce evidence that the Blaines had
married in Pittsburgh on March 29, 1851, and that their first child was born
less than three months later on June 18.
Blaine's response was that there had been two
marriage ceremonies. A private one in Millsburg, Pennsylvania, on June 30, 1850,
without a minister, public notice, or state license. When the couple was living
in Kentucky, Blaine feared that the lack of license made the marriage
illegitimate under Kentucky law, so they remarried in Pittsburgh with a minister
and license. At the time, however, it was Kentucky that did not require a
marriage license and Pennsylvania that did. Other irregularities in Blaine's
story came to light, such as the fact that June 30, 1850, occurred on a Sunday,
a day when most Protestants would not schedule a wedding. Also, Blaine would
have been only twenty years old, and thus a minor marrying without parental
approval. Whatever the reality was (and of the eyewitnesses, only the
Blaines were still alive in 1884), the Republican nominee once again seemed like
a liar, in contrast to his Democratic rival, and Blaine's possible involvement
in a premarital sexual relationship uncut the force of the Republican use of
Cleveland's Maria Halpin affair.
Republican Campaign
Blaine's letter of acceptance promoted the benefits
of a protective tariff and greater trade with Latin America, two issues of vital
interest and importance to the nominee. Previously known for his prevalent
"waving of the bloody shirt" (associating the Democratic party with secession,
rebellion, and violence), in 1880 Blaine had encouraged the Garfield campaign to
emphasize the tariff, instead. In his 1884 letter of acceptance, the Republican
nominee observed (wrongly) that a changing South made the bloody shirt
irrelevant. He also emphatically approved of civil service reform, and, unlike
Cleveland's vague endorsement, Blaine detailed ways of expanding it, such as
including the foreign service. The Mugwumps, however, were not buying such a
last-minute conversion. Blaine made tariff protection the core of his campaign.
Like Garfield, Blaine was very active managing
the campaign behind the scenes. The chairman of the Republican National
Committee was Benjamin Jones, a wealthy steel magnate from Pittsburgh, but daily
operations were handled by Stephen Elkins, a coal baron from West Virginia and a
close friend of Blaine's. President Arthur remained aloof from the Republican
campaign, but vice-presidential nominee John Logan dedicated all his energies to
the battle. Logan concentrated on extolling the virtues of the previous five
Republican administrations, which a Blaine-Logan administration would continue.
Logan served the ticket loyally, even though he and Blaine were known to dislike
each other, and the Illinois senator was never welcomed into Blaine's inner
circle. Except for vigor, Logan did not bring much to the Republican ticket. He
was popular with Western Republicans, but so was Blaine.
Following in the footsteps of Democratic
candidates Stephen Douglas (1860), Horatio Seymour (1868), and Horace Greeley
(1872), Republican Blaine went on a campaign tour in the fall. It was a grueling
schedule of more than 400 speeches across several states over a six-weeks
period. He spent two weeks in Ohio, and the state went Republican in its October
state elections. After traversing the Midwest, an exhausted Blaine headed for
New York.
Blaine's New York Woes
In 1884, New York had more electoral votes than any
other state, was competitively contested between Republicans and Democrats, and
was crucial for both parties in winning the White House. The personal animosity
of John Kelly toward Cleveland had been smoothed over by Hendricks and others,
so that the Tammany Hall boss reluctantly supported the Democratic national
ticket in New York. The Republican ticket, however, was hindered by the
obstinate opposition of former senator Roscoe Conkling. When party mediators
solicited his cooperation, the bitter rival of the Republican nominee replied:
"Gentlemen, you have been misinformed. I have given up criminal law!" Although
Conkling did not actively campaign against Blaine, he did write anonymous
commentaries attacking the Republican nominee, which were published in the New
York World.
To compound Blaine's trouble in New York, he
faced two public-relations disasters in the final days before the election. On
October 29, a tired Blaine attended a meeting of Protestant clergy at New York's
posh Fifth Avenue Hotel. The attendees passed resolutions endorsing the
Republican ticket and condemning the Democratic party. One of the speakers, the
Reverend Samuel Burchard, depicted the Democrats as the party of "Rum, Romanism,
and Rebellion." The sentiment was nothing new. James Garfield had uttered it in
1876, and it encapsulated mainstream Republican stereotypes of the Democratic
party. The political problem for Blaine was that he had been courting Irish
Catholic voters, by criticizing British policies toward Ireland. Democrats
distributed the remark to Northern cities with large Catholic communities.
Blaine did not repudiate Burchard's anti-Catholic slur until after it had been
widely publicized and its damage was too great to be reversed.
Making a bad day worse, on the evening of October
29, Blaine attended a fundraising dinner at New York City's elegant restaurant,
Delmonico's. The guest list of rich contributors included Jay Gould and John
Jacob Astor. Blaine spoke on the topic of the Republican role in generating
economic prosperity for New York City and the nation. Unfortunately for the
candidate, it lent credence to Democratic claims that the Republicans cared only
for the interests of the rich, not the working class. The next day, a damning
cartoon by Walt McDougall appeared in the New York World. It condemned the
Delmonico dinner through a biblical analogy to the avarice and hedonism of King
Belshazzar's court. Entitled "Belshazzar
Blaine and the Money Kings," the cartoon featured Blaine and his wealthy
contributors feasting greedily on a lavish array of political spoils, while in
front of their table a poor family begs for table scraps, unnoticed by the
self-indulgent dinner guests.
Election Results
On November 4, 1884, 78½ percent of the American
electorate cast ballots for president, a figure down only slightly from the
turnout in 1880. The results were even closer than the previous election. The
election in New York state was so close that it was not known until several days
after the polls closed. Cleveland narrowly captured his home state, and won the
popular total by less than 3/10 of a percent, collecting 4,875,971 votes (48.5%)
to Blaine's 4,852,234 (48.26%). Greenback-Labor nominee Benjamin Butler won 1.8%
of the vote, while Prohibitionist nominee John St. John received 1.5%. St.
John's New York vote totals were particularly harmful to Blaine.
In the Electoral College, it was New York that
provided the Cleveland margin of victory, 219-182. The new Democratic president,
the first elected since before the Civil War, also won the entire South; the
border states of Maryland, Delaware, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri;
plus, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Indiana. Blaine won the rest of the North and
all the Western states. In such a close election, many factors have an
exaggerated effect: scandals, gaffes, third parties, bad weather, and an
economic downturn. But voters on both sides were also casting ballots for
positive reasons, because the candidates represented the skill or the character
that they wanted to see in the White House and stood for the issues that most
concerned them.
Sources consulted: William A. DeGregario, The
Complete Book of U.S. Presidents; Mark D. Hirsh, "Election of 1884," in Arthur
Schlesinger Jr., ed., History of Presidential Elections; Mark W. Summers, Rum,
Romanism, & Rebellion: The Making of a President: 1884; Richard E. Welch Jr.,
The Presidencies of Grover Cleveland.
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